OpenStreetMap (new tab)

Google Map (new tab)

Google Streetview (new tab)

Overview

New York architect John P. Gaynor (b.1827) operated a San Francisco branch office during the 1870s and 1880s, while he worked on the huge Palace Hotel for the Comstock Lode millionaire William Chapman Ralston (1826-1875). Ralston overextended himself building the Palace Hotel, and soon faced significant financial problems, when he drowned in San Francisco Bay on 08/27/1875. (Ralston's problems were exacerbated by his highly leveraged purchase of the Spring Valley Water Company and his failed attempts to sell it back to the City of San Francisco and the Panic of 1873's effect on the stock price of his Bank of California. See Ferol Egan,Last Bonanza Kings: The Bourns of San Francisco, [Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2009], p. 168-169.) His associate, another Comstock Lode banker, William Tang Sharon (1821-1885), bought Ralston's assets after his death at well below face value. He continued Ralston's association with Gaynor when he designed these flats for Sharon completed in 1884.

Building Notes

The architectural history Susan Dinkelspiel Cerny, in her An Architectural Guidebook to San Francisco and the Bay Area, stated of this apartment building erected for the financier William Sharon in 1884: "This row of flats is a transition between the Italianate and Stick-Eastlake styles. Faceted pyramidal roofs over projecting bays are unusual. The flats were built for William Sharon, who also built the Palace Hotel." (See Susan Dinkelspiel Cerny, An Architectural Guidebook to San Francisco and the Bay Area, [Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2007] p. 69-70.)

PCAD id: 20525